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The Life of Matthias de Véreaux
Seigneur of Montclair
Author’s Notes
An Interview About The Life of Matthias de Véreaux
After finishing the story of The Life of Matthias de Véreaux, I thought it might be interesting to explain where the story came from. The origin of this story is unusual, and the experience behind it has stayed with me for many years.
To make this easier to explain, I’ve presented these notes in the form of a short interview.
What first inspired the character of Matthias de Véreaux?
The actual name was created later, but the story itself came from a very long and vivid dream I had several years ago.
In that dream, I experienced all of this as if I were actually living it. I experienced Matthias’s life, the moment of his death, and even what happened afterward.
This story is actually a prequel to another story I wrote years ago called “A Haunted Soul.” That story takes place after Matthias’s death, when he awakens outside the château as a lonely spirit who walks the grounds for hundreds of years.
In the dream, I experienced all of that.
I experienced the full passage of time.
When I eventually came out of the dream and became myself again, it was a tremendous shock.
Was Matthias’s personality something you created later when writing the story?
No.
That was exactly who Matthias was in the dream.
In the dream, I was Matthias. I experienced everything he experienced. His thoughts, his habits, and his life all felt as detailed and real as my own life feels now.
Did the town of Montclair and Matthias’s daily life come from the dream as well?
The basic scenes did.
I remembered many parts of the town, the forest, and the château, but I didn’t remember every detail perfectly. As I wrote the story, I had to recreate certain smaller details to fill in the gaps where memories had faded.
When I first woke up from the dream years ago, I had already forgotten a great deal of it.
Recently, however, something happened in my life that unexpectedly brought those memories back very clearly. That is why I decided to write the story now, after all this time.
In the story, Matthias feels deeply connected to the people of Montclair even though he still feels somewhat distant from them. Did you feel that in the dream as well?
Yes.
In the dream, I did not feel close to my own family at all. But I still felt a very strong instinctive need for family.
The town filled that role as much as it possibly could.
Even then, I still felt like something of a visitor among them. I cared deeply about the people of the town, but there was always a sense that I stood slightly apart from them.
The scene of Matthias’s death is very vivid in the story. Did you experience that moment in the dream as well?
Yes.
I experienced Matthias’s death in that exact and very detailed way. It still haunts me to this day.
I would challenge anyone reading this to try to imagine what the moment of their own murder would feel like and how it would affect them.
It is not something easily forgotten.
Did the part about Matthias existing as a spirit for hundreds of years also occur in the same dream?
Yes.
It was all one enormous dream, and I experienced the full passage of those centuries.
When I began waking up from the dream, it felt like I was floating upward from the bottom of a lake toward the surface of the waking world.
The higher I rose, the more the memories began to slip away.
I remember desperately telling myself to remember what I had experienced, because I could feel it disappearing.
I was losing myself as Matthias and returning to my waking self.
While you were dreaming, did it feel like you were watching Matthias’s life or actually living it?
I was him.
I experienced the dream as Matthias.
Occasionally I would remember my waking self, but those moments never lasted long. When they happened, I sometimes thought my waking life might actually be the dream.
Then the experience would pull me back into Matthias’s life again.
When you wrote the earlier story, “A Haunted Soul,” did you already know Matthias’s full life story?
Not completely.
At that time, I only clearly remembered the moment of his death and his existence as a spirit afterward. I remembered pieces of his life, but not enough to tell the full story.
Only recently did the rest of those memories return to me.
There are things from that dream that still affect me deeply even now.
Did anything about Matthias become clearer to you while writing this story?
Yes.
The way he lived his life inside the château.
As I was writing the story, I realized that my own life today resembles that lifestyle in some surprising ways. I now live in a very similar quiet, thoughtful way without realizing that I had experienced something like it years earlier in that dream.
What do you hope readers take away from this story?
More than anything, I simply wanted to share the experience.
It was something very heavy in my life, and writing the story feels almost like a form of therapy.
Sometimes telling a story is the only way to make sense of something that stayed with you for a long time.
After writing the full story, do you understand the dream any better?
Not really.
It is still mysterious to me why it happened or how I was able to experience the passage of time the way I did.
But writing the story has given me a new insight into Matthias himself.
It made me realize that he was not so different from me after all.
And if you ever find yourself wondering what became of Matthias after that night in the château hallway, his story does not end there. In another tale I once wrote, titled A Haunted Soul, his long and lonely journey continues.
After all, some lives do not truly end when the body falls - sometimes they simply continue in quieter ways.
(If you liked this story, leave me a comment to encourage me to write more.)
